Jeremy Blanton – Page 49

Linking Strategies for Your Blog

How To Blog, Online Consulting, WordPress Tutorials

We write blogs regularly and share wonderful information with others. One of the integral parts of a blog post are the links. These links give an added layer of depth of knowledge to your posts. What most don’t realize is that the links you insert into a post have either an internal or external destination. By internal or external destination, I mean that the link is either going to direct the reader off of my domain to another site or direct the reader to some other place inside my site.

When adding links into your blog post you need to be aware of what the affect will be when someone clicks on it. If the link is sending them off your site, you may want to make sure the link is opening in a new tab/window on the consumers browser. If the link is staying on your site, have the link open in the same window. Why? Well, if I write a post and share a quote from someone else and link to them, I am going to give a link to that person in my post. I don’t want to take my consumers completely away from my site because once they leave my URL and land at that other domain there is no telling where they would go. However, if the link opens in a new tab on the web browser, my site is still there for the consumer to return back quickly and easily.

How To Set Links Targets

When you insert a link, into a post, you have the ability to set the target to either open the link in the same window or open link in a new window. So, next time you enter a link into your blog, make sure you set the target. While this doesn’t seem like much, it can increase the amount of time people are spending on your site. The more time spent on your site by consumers means the higher the probability of someone doing business with you.

So when you write your next blog post take a moment to think about your link target and set it to keep consumers with you as much as possible!

Social Media Winner of the Week: BlogTalkRadio!

Social Media Winner

Keeping our series on social media winners we come across, today I wanted to share about a great story that happened to me recently. As many of you know, I participate in an online radio show called Social Media Edge with Ken Cook, Jason Crouch, & Mike Mueller. The show airs every Tuesday at noon and we have been blessed with some really awesome guests in the past. I have been actively participating in the show now for well over a year. We broadcast online at BlogTalkRadio every week.

During our last broadcast, I had several people in the chatroom complaining about the ads that kept running on the screen. These ads would take over the sound of the broadcast and you would miss important parts on topics we were discussing. Since I normally call into the show instead of just listening online, I didn’t know what they were really talking about. Then later on that same day I was listening to a friend on a different broadcast on BlogTalkRadio.

The person being interviewed has a soft voice so I had to crank up the volume on my computer to hear. Now one thing that you must understand is this. Since I work in my home office all day long, I like to have music playing at louder than normal volumes. To accomplish this, I have connected my computer up to it’s own home theater. Might be a little overkill, but I love it. So I had the volume for this particular broadcast maxed out to be able to hear the guest.

All of a sudden music started blaring and almost made blood come out of my eardrums from the loudness as a commercial for Tide Detergent started playing. I immediately searched for a mute or pause button and after about 7 seconds I could quiet the ad. In my frustration, I sent out a tweet to @blogtalkradio saying the following:

Hey @blogtalkradio the auto player ads on the radio shows is really annoying. It interrupts the show! Please fix it!less than a minute ago via TweetDeckJeremy Blanton
jb140

To which the promptly replied:

@jb140 Hi Jeremy, Thanks for ur feedback. Would it be possible to have a quick convo with you about your experience? Can u DM us with a #?less than a minute ago via CoTweetblogtalkradio
blogtalkradio

I sent them my contact info and within minutes my phone rang. I had an awesome conversation with Amy and she apologized for the inconvenience as well as asked if she could help with anything else. She was beyond friendly and helpful. She even gave me her skype ID to contact her if we had any other issues in the future.

Paying attention to what consumers are saying about your business is vital. You need to constantly be monitoring what consumers are saying both positively and negatively. More importantly, you need to have someone handling the social media aspect of your company that can make you a winner and not a loser. In this example, BlogTalkRadio has done very well by having Amy handle their social media monitoring and because of that has won our Social Media Winner of the Week award!

Making your WordPress Site More Social

Social Media Advisors, Social Media Training, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials

We all hear the importance of social media and why you need to have a strong presence in it. We know that there are sites like Facebook, Twitter, & YouTube and other social networks. Many times though we want to see what type of results these social networks are sending in traffic to your sites.

As I mentioned recently in a post, we need to be more social and less media with our social media marketing efforts. But, for those of you looking for cold hard facts to prove that you are not in a giant vortex of time wasting I have some stats for you. Currently, our site is averaging around 30% of our traffic directly from social media platforms. We still are seeing a huge section from search engines and referring sites, but our number of clicks from various social platforms like Twitter and Facebook are increasing rapidly. Because of the increased success, I wanted to share a few things you can do to make your site more social and easy for readers to distribute your content out to social media platforms.

Since I have a fond love for WordPress Sites, here are a few plugins that can be used on your site to increase it’s socialness. (yes, I just made my own word up)

Facebook Share- This plugin has played a huge role in our content being shared. I purposefully placed this plugin at the top right of my posts to make it in eyesight the minute you visit a page. Several of our posts have received well over 40 shares. The average person on Facebook has well over 100 friends. That means that my simple post has just been given the opportunity of being viewed by over 4,000 people!
Twitter Retweet- There are several different buttons that can be used for Twitter sharing of your blog posts. I like the Tweetmeme button personally. Once again our posts are being tweeted well over 40-50 times. Recently, a post I wrote about Google Instant was tweeted by Chris Brogan. Currently he has over 158,000 followers on twitter. His one tweet placed my post in front of all those eyes. Not to mention that his tribe that read the post and liked it then tweeted it out too. This button gets placed at the top of my post right with the Facebook Share for optimum exposure.
Facebook Like- This plugin gets overlooked many times because it doesn’t place a fancy graphic on the person’s feed and a link. But what it does do is place a link that says the name of your post on their Facebook profile. If that is done by 70-80 people this will also drive traffic to your site. I place this plugin at the bottom of my posts to give everyone one more reminder to share stuff they enjoyed.
Sexy Bookmarks- This is a personal favorite of mine. This plugin simply rocks. I liked it so much I actually wrote about it before here. On a side note, they are also a company that uses social media well as they were recently named our Social Media Winner of the Week. The reason I enjoy this plugin is that it opens up endless possibilities for your content to be shared. With a simple click of a button at the bottom of a post your blog post can be shared with over 90 different social media platforms. Included in that list is Google Reader, Posterous, LinkedIn, Email, and so many others. Half of them I have never even heard of!

I have no doubts that the reason I have seen the recent increases in traffic from social media platforms is being caused by these four plugins above. The other major reason for an increase in traffic from these sources is the involvement of both myself and by business partner on the various platforms.

If these plugins are implemented along with the proper use of a social media marketing strategies, you will see a great increase in traffic to your site. The one point that cannot be overlooked in this entire blog post is the previous statement. You have to be using social media platforms like Twitter & Facebook in the ways they were intended and not just spamming others. Remember, installing the plugins is the easy part. Getting consumers to visit your site and use the social plugins willingly is the tough part.

photo credit-ahisgett